The End of European Civilization

While blogs and other forms of essays abound in this year of grace (though surely blog still sounds unlikely as a vehicle for high art), it is still a feat to be able to achieve fame as an essayist. Yet Theodore Dalrymple (a pseudonym) has done just that. In collections of essays such as Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses; and Not With a Bang But a Whimper, Dalrymple, a former prison psychiatrist in Britain who has written often for the London Spectator, has dissected the British underclass. He has also deplored the mania of punters mourning "the People's Princess," applauded the surprising uses of corruption in Italy, and excoriated the vulgarism of Lady Chatterley's Lover. From serious to amusing subjects, from politics to the arts, Dalrymple is a master of the essay. His interviews have even appeared on YouTube, though that speaks more to his popular than to his critical acclaim.

The same wit and insight that coruscate through his essays are also evident in the longer and more rambling essay that constitutes The New Vichy Syndrome. For one thing the title, apparently the product of the publisher's desire for a different book, is attached to a work that avoids Vichy both as a metaphor and as history. For that matter one might expect more consideration of the arts, one of Dalrymple's usual concerns. Yet, aside from a horrified mention of European philistines destroying their heritage, there is nothing about the horrors of, say, reggiestheatre, in which a director decides to make Mozart contemporary by having Don Giovanni roll about on a dead horse whilst ingesting the animal's intestines. I had expected more on the arts from an essayist who chastises D. H. Lawrence for crudeness and who is clearly capable of writing excellent aesthetic commentary, but the barbarism of the title is less ordinary philistinism than Europe's feckless abandonment of its essential civilization. For Dalrymple the barbarians are not as much the Muslim hordes as they are the Europeans themselves, who have traded their heritage's vichyssoise for sloppy joes.

Dalrymple is aware of the threat that Islam poses to old Europe and discusses this at length. Islam has threatened Europe for centuries, first as an army of conquest and now as a growing underclass. Yet Dalrymple is no alarmist—for him the urgent threat is not a simple matter of demographics. He knows that such trends are not necessarily inevitable, and he believes that assimilation will occur even amidst the supposedly recalcitrant Muslims. He points to the culture of the Muslim male youth, whose dress and behavior are more nearly slovenly European than Middle Eastern.

To some readers Dalrymple may seem rather sanguine in his assessment of Islam's threat. The soigné French gathering for cocktails in Neuilly or on the Île St. Louis often seem unaware of the growing Islamic underclass that threatens to undo their own pleasant but hardly ancien régime. Even former President Sarkozy and his government's recent outlawing of the traditional headwear of Muslim women is probably more pro-French than it is anti-Muslim per se. In this case Dr. Dalrymple might not be entirely unsympathetic. When Muslim men told Muslim women in medical school that they were expected to wear the hajib, Dalrymple and the hospital staff discovered hospital rules that took care of this particular problem and saved the women from that hindrance. The women were grateful; they had been afraid to stand up to the men themselves for fear they might be made to quit their medical training.

Dalrymple finds the Muslim male's oppression of Muslim women wholly unacceptable, rooted not so much in religion as in what Anthony Hecht called "the bully's thin superiority." The Muslim women whom Dalrymple has known are eager for improvement, for education, for escape from an old-world tyranny that still binds them in obedience to father and husband. The young males, on...